In the past the variety of propliner at Heathrow was much greater. This excellent collection bought together by Tom Singfield includes the likes of Vickers Viscounts, Fokker F-27s, Bristol Britannias plus special guests from the Eastern Bloc.
A great book.
A graphic novel adaptation of the Agatha Christie "whodunnit" classic? When its done as lavishly and as opulent as this then why not?
This is a beautiful piece of work in full colour and is a hardback book too. The story is claimed to hark back more to the interwar mystery of the original book rather than later film adaptations starring the likes of Peter Ustinov but i have to admit, i had him or David Suchet in my mind whenever Poirot appeared on page!
The story of course involves a murder that takes place on a luxury cruise down the River Nile in Egypt and the investigation (and further events) that take place later on. Luckily, famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is one of the passengers on the cruise and begins to investigate the crime...
The only criticisms of this work is that sometimes it is a bit unclear as to what is going on because some of the characters are drawn a bit similar looking, and some of the panels probably could have done with being reorganised a bit to make the narrative flow more clearly. These are minor niggles though that do not detract from the sheer enjoyment you get from this stylish production which transports you to that lavish and mysterious 1930s world... where posh people had a rather unfortunate habit of being murdered.
After my trip to Essex and London last time, for the latest trip i ventured much closer to home. The transport museum in Wythall is a marvellous thing. A wonderful collection of buses and other vehicles including a large collection of milk floats! I had a good look around the collection, took many photos of course and also some videos of the buses moving about.
This included one of my beloved WMPTE Daimler Fleetlines. The buses of my childhood, indeed my earliest memory is being on one aged about 3 or 4. I was with my Mum and going to my Nan's house in Shard End. Who knows, maybe one of the Fleetlines in the museum collection was the very bus i went on that time? We'll never know. Anyway, you can see my photos here.
Interestingly, one of the museum's exhibits was an autonomous bus. The very bus i travelled on when it was on trial at the business park i work on in 2023. A different autonomous bus is currently on trial in fact but the bus from 2023 is now in a museum. It just shows you how fast technology moves sometimes!
A recently discharged Royal Navy man takes over a neglected cottage and aims to become a market gardener. He makes friends with the locals and all seems to be going well...
Then we jump straight into a police procedural after the crime has taken place. The investigation is nicely complicated and involves investigating into the secrets of the victim's past to establish a motive and hence identify the perpetrator.
A good read.
The photographs in this book by Tom Singfield are well reproduced with informative captions and there is a good variety including some quite rare beasts such as the VFW 614. A great nostalgic look at jetliners as they used to be.
Our heroine is schoolgirl Fran, who is caught up in the devastating disaster and tries to find her sister, who had already gone to Scotland (and assumed safety).
With her parents missing, presumed drowned, Fran is all alone until she meets up with her best friend Jill and they have a long series of adventures in this new dangerous and very wet world. Not only are the endless rains and floods a problem, we also have various gangs of evil adults set to exploit the survivors (though as this was a comic aimed at children, the teenage girls are exploited for slave labour not anything else of course). That is bad enough though as plenty of whips seem to have survived the flooding if little else.
Fran and Jill have a mixture of very bad luck (in getting into an endless series of bad situations) and good luck (in how they always manage to get out of them!) The story is very enjoyable though obviously intended to be read in short chunks weekly. Reading the story collected into a single volume can get a bit repetitive at times. Overall though this a taut and frequently intense tale, well written by Alan Davison and with classic British style comic artwork by Phil Gascoine.
When i did finally get this book a couple of years ago (eBay natch), the vast majority of passenger coaches covered in this book were now long gone (except for preserved railway lines) so there is not much left to recognise!
However, this is a great nostalgic guide to the days when locomotives hauled passengers around, not multiple units which sound like angry wasps. An elegant document from a more civilised age.
I was sent the draft cover design for my second book on the railway stations of Warwickshire by my publisher yesterday. It looks pretty good and i am looking forward to the book coming out, probably about April 2026.
A while ago the producers of a range of British inland waterways maps (Heron Maps) asked me if they could use a photograph i had taken of the Wey Navigation in Guildford. The map is now complete and they sent me a couple of the maps today, and it is really nice to see my photo included. You can get the map here, it is a very nice production indeed.
In this volume released by Cinebook, Blake & Mortimer are caught up into a taut cold war drama involving extraterrestrial derived biological weapons (of course), renegade scientists (natch) and KGB agents and a battle of wits across Moscow, London and ..er.. Liverpool on the eve of the space race.
As with all of the Blake & Mortimer books, there is a lot of story squeezed into one volume. At times maybe it may seem the story is a little dense but then again you are definitely getting your money's worth!
It was my birthday last week and i had the week off work. Late in the week i headed down to London to visit my in-laws in east London. I also made the trip down to Southend-on-Sea. I love a bit of faded British seaside glamour (and at this time of year very faded!) I walked along the pier (the longest pleasure pier in the world) and took the train which runs along it back! You can see my Southend-on-Sea photos here.
On the way back to London, i stopped off at Rochford and had a look around there. I also stopped off at Southend Airport station though no planes were currently flying, the airport there is not quite as busy as Heathrow! You can see my Rochford and Southend Airport photos here.
A professional criminal is hired to steal bonds from a rich businessman who lives in a heavily guarded compound. A key part of the security is provided by some large dogs (hence the cover image!)
The actual caper is a bit ridiculous (he is smuggled into the compound with it's highly lauded security in a car boot!) Too much of the story involves him wandering around the house, mostly aimlessly, at night trying to find documents. It isn't the most thrilling crime story you will ever read at times. However, it does built up to a satisfying and action packed conclusion.
The story isn't bad but it is a bit too wordy, it has pages of dialogue which go nowhere but no doubt help pad the thin plot out. The story includes quite a lot of crudity and bad language which leaves me a bit cold.
Although I'm pretty potty mouthed myself, i strangely do not really enjoy reading it!
However, thousands of stations have been closed as well. There were over 9,000 stations in existence during the 20th century. There were also 1,200 stations which opened and closed in the 19th century, this book covers these.
This is an excellent reference work by Paul Smith and Sally Salmon. Each station is given an entry detailing the dates of opening and closing, it's location (sometimes assumed) and also a snippet from a period Ordnance Survey map showing where the station used to be.
Many of the stations were simply replaced by larger, more capable stations as the rail industry developed and expanded. However, other stations too were closed and the line removed. Robbing some communities of a rail connection for over a hundred years.
An excellent little book which i will no doubt find useful in my own railway book writings. Now for some photographs of open stations!
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A controversial book, this is one of the earliest Tintin stories from the early 1930s (though this edition has coloured artwork done in 1946). When originally created, this story depicted the colonial racist attitudes of the time towards Africa, plus a rather bloodthirsty approach to dealing with wildlife.
Later editions toned down both, Herge feeling embarrassed by what he originally drew, but enough remains of both which meant this edition of Tintin was not published in English until 2005 (the original black and white edition was published in 1931). When it was finally published there were attempts to ban it but if you actually read this story it does seem rather like an over reaction.
Tintin goes to the Congo, then a Belgian colony, and soon begins a break neck series of adventures including various battles with wild animals and native people. However, most of the story involves a criminal white man who is finally unveiled as part of Al Capone's operation, and aiming to help the Chicago gangster boss take over diamond smuggling in Africa...
The story lacks the depth of plot of later Tintin stories, being more a series of subplots vaguely linked (and then mostly by geography). The story of course has a very patronising attitude to African people who are largely depicted as being childlike and needing direction from the white man. The book reflected the attitude of Europeans to Africans at the time (1930s) and should be viewed in that light, its not much more offensive than say Carry On Up The Jungle. Of course, Africans are still patronised in the Western media these days, just in a different way.
Some events in the book are rather cringe worthy, such as Tintin being revered as an idol by an African tribe. The slaughter of wildlife i personally found more of a problem but it does date from when the natural world had what appeared to be a limitless abundance of fauna so accidentally slaughtering a herd of antelope was maybe not quite so big a deal!
The book is what it is, and to be honest i quite enjoyed it, view it like that and you might too. Its nowhere near as good as most later Tintin books but is interesting on a number of levels including as a historical document of 1930s colonial attitudes.
This volume presents classic British transports from the 1970s and 1980s including the Andover, Argosy and Comet. The last generation of aircraft from when Britain had it's own independent aircraft industry making it's own big jets and not just parts of other people's (although to be fair making big chunks of Airbuses is a huge industry).
The volume has a number of excellent colour and black and white photographs. The nostalgia factor is high. Luckily many of these workhorses have preserved examples at RAF Cosford, a selection can be seen below.
At the weekend i visited the Buckinghamshire town of Wendover which is near Aylesbury. I have been once before but on that occasion i was more interested in seeing the remains of the Wendover Arm of the Grand Union Canal so missed much of the town out including the church. On this second trip i visited Wendover properly and it is a very fine little place. You can see my photos here.
This amazing volume collects together all of the Ro-Busters adventures from Star Lord and later on 2000AD (which i started reading because Ro-Busters moved there after Star Lord folded).
In many ways, Ro-Busters was inspired by the TV series Thunderbirds though with sarcastic robots instead of puppets obviously. The earlier adventures are fairly simple adventure/rescue stories but later on the stories began to mature, and politics and social comment made their appearance, especially after the move to 2000AD. Despite being a comic strip primarily involving robots the stories managed to include amazing levels of emotion and soul.
Ro-Jaws, Hammerstein and the rather dodgy cyborg boss Mr Quartz are the stars of the strip though as time went on a whole host of secondary characters also began to build up including the deranged Mek-Quake. The collection takes us through to the conclusion of the script in an epic final story where the Ro-Busters are broken up and Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein try and escape the Earth.
Later on they were reunited in Nemesis and the ABC Warriors of course but this is to come...
The plucky heroine has arrived from the US to rescue her young nephew, the heir to a business empire, who is in danger from a brutal gang. With the help of a reporter, they manage to keep one step ahead of the gang of ruffians. Meanwhile, the family patriarch approaches death...
The book has a number of surprises and keeps you gripped, more or less, though can be pretty silly at times.
This is an excellent book by Philip Matyszak which tells the story of the republic from the time the last kings of Rome were overthrown to the time Julius Caesar and Augustus ushered in a new age. The story of the republic is presented in a very approachable manner with excellent illustrations throughout.
It might not have mad emperors but there are plenty of big personalities here too such as Sulla, the Gracchis and Cicero. Oh Cicero, if i had had a son i would have named him after Cicero. Luckily for both of them this probably will never happen.
Last weekend i headed down to Coventry to revisit the wonderful transport museum there. I am currently building a new section of my website which is dedicated to road transport, and one thing i need to do is to update my photography on the many many exhibits there. Coventry Transport Museum has a superb collection ranging from the oldest cars to the fastest ones!
You can see my photographs here.
This wonderful book covers the great man's career as he rose to prominence in the 1930s, designing some of the most famous locomotives ever built including Flying Scotsman and the Mallard, still the speed world record holder for steam.
There was a lot more though to Gresley's legacy, including many humble engines which worked freight and branch lines, as well as other rolling stock. Even one of the earliest main line electric locomotives!
David McIntosh's book is lavishly illustrated, including many colour photographs of preserved engines as well as black and white period photographs when Gresley's creations were running the railway. A fitting tribute to the great man.
This is an interesting read with some great photographs and diagrams. I enjoyed some of the anecdotes about British Army balloons being used for reconnaissance in the Boer War. The Boers expended so much ammunition in a vain attempt to shoot down the balloons it probably had more adverse affect on their war effort than the spotting from the balloons.
A lovely book on the very earliest British military aviation, and often superbly odd.
I am a fan of the B-movie which hit their heights in the 1930s. These were often great films too, made on a small budget and starring second tier stars - often up-and-comers or fading stars on the way down, plus the occasional A-lister just filling in a bit of time. The creation of these films was often fascinating, sometimes re-using the same sets of concurrent main features!
While the major studios themselves created hundreds of B-movies, there were also smaller studios who specialised in churning these kinds of films out. One of the best known of these studios was Monogram who produced many films between 1931 and 1953 when they changed name to Allied Artists Pictures and moved into other areas of the market including TV. TV of course eventually killed off the B-movie.
This book lists every film Monogram released during those years (and that means hundreds of them) and is a great source of information. I watched many Monogram films when i was reviewing 1,999 films on my movie review blog, quite a lot of them are rather good. Though I have to admit, quite a lot of them were drivel too!
The Sea King is iconic of course, originally a US designed and built helicopter, the UK version was built by Westland served in the Falklands, Gulf Wars and Afghanistan and other theatres. However, this book concentrates on the version used for SAR duties.
The book starts with a short general history of the use of helicopters in rescue operations and then the development of the Westland Sea King. Much of the book is taken up with the Sea King's innards and how to maintain it (as you would expect from a Haynes manual!)
What is most interesting here is the more specialised equipment unique to a SAR helicopter and role. The book ends with a few examples of the many rescues and recovery operations the Sea King was involved with during its career. A good book.
Those days have passed of course, though examples of those locomotive classes can still be seen on the national network, but usually hauling a special train such as an excursion. This excellent book by Gavin Morrison covers these locomotives, as well as the earlier classes which were being withdrawn as i started to take a railway interest and the ones which followed (which are easier to see still on the network).
Great photography throughout covering the range of liveries they wore in BR service and into the early years of privatisation, i must admit i like the locomotives most when in their BR blue, with the steel BR symbol on the sides. That takes me back. A more elegant livery for a more civilised age.
